SharePlay is not why co-streaming app Rave was kicked off the App Store

Rave has had very poor user content moderation for years, so Apple booted it off the App Store. Now, it's suing Apple, but it's not telling the whole story.

In August 2025, Apple had removed Rave from its App Store. According to Rave, Apple never gave the developers the exact reason for doing so.

"11.4 million users locked out," reads SaveRave.com, "Apple disabled Sign in with Apple for Rave, locking users out of accounts they'd used for years."

There's more.

"Apple revoked Rave's developer certificate, causing macOS to block Rave with a false malware warning," it says.

Rave says that it tried to work with Apple. It asked what it had done wrong, and allegedly the tech giant responded with "a single vague clause."

The company says that Apple's reasons and timelines kept changing. Eventually, Apple issued a permanent removal notice and refused to work with Rave.

Now, Rave is suing Apple in five countries: the United States, the Netherlands, Brazil, Russia, and its home country of Canada.

Rave says Apple removed its app, which has been in existence for about a decade, and competes with Apple's own co-viewing platform, SharePlay. It's likely Apple wouldn't love direct competition, because it does have a competing feature.

It's not that cut and dried.

Out of character

So, let's say Apple sees Rave as a direct competitor to SharePlay. And let's overlook the fact that SharePlay is likely not a feature that Apple considers a major driver of sales or subscriptions in the first place.

Apple doesn't have a history of banning its competition, or booting apps off the App Store that it has "Sherlocked" along the way.

To date, it hasn't banned Spotify, despite owning competing services Apple Music and Apple Podcasts. Apple doesn't ban Netflix, Disney+, or Hulu, even though Apple TV exists.

Apple gets accused of Sherlocking, creating a first-party tool that is almost functionally identical to a third-party tool, pretty often. And to be clear, yes, Apple does Sherlock features.

However, Apple doesn't remove or ban those apps. When Apple introduced Invites in 2025, it didn't ban Partiful, which is still available on the iOS App Store.

It didn't remove or ban Omnifocus or Things 3 or Fantastical or Luna Display. Apple absolutely siphoned off users and potentially prevented new users from joining up because of the good-enough native feature.

That's not the argument Rave is making.

Bubbling up from the sewers

Rave is employing the classic "I'm just a little guy," tactic here. According to Rave's press release:

"As long as Apple's 'gatekeeper' power remains unchecked, no developer operating within Apple's ecosystem can ever be secure. When a dominant platform removes competing products without a fair process or accountability, all developers are disincentivized to invest in the sort of innovation that builds businesses, creates jobs and benefits consumers."

Rave is being a little dishonest about the path that led to it being removed in 2025. Okay, maybe it's being a little more than a little dishonest.

For years, Rave was plagued with issues. And not just minor issues, though I suppose that depends on which definition of "minor" you're working off of.

The app was grossly under-moderated. Every stream had a chat room, which meant that public viewing "rooms" were entirely unmoderated.

According to Rave's terms of service, users are only required to be age 13 to use the service. If a room were under- or unmoderated, it would be putting minors at undue risk.

That alone would be grounds enough for Apple to, at the very least, tell Rave to get its ducks in a row. Especially as Section 230 protections wouldn't apply because of a lack of good-faith moderation.

It gets worse.

A quick peruse of Reddit, and some emails we got over the years that the app was active, shows many users complaining of instances of Child Sex Abuse Material (CSAM), pornography, gore, and more. Additionally, the app was often flooded with links leading out to platforms like Telegram and Signal, specifically to funnel more people to illegal content.

It was also known, for a time, as a hotbed of scammers and bots. Even Google had temporarily pulled Rave down — quite recently, I may add — citing security and malware concerns.

The issues mentioned above were prevalent as recently as five months ago. Apple had removed the Rave app in August 2025.

Since then, Rave claims that it has stepped up its security protocols. It boasts AI-powered moderation tools specifically designed to prevent grooming and predatory patterns in chat, age verification, hash matching with child safety databases, gore detection, and prevention of links to external apps like Telegram.

It does appear that it has, at the very least, instated the bare minimum moderation system. User-posted complaints on Reddit have dwindled over the past six months, suggesting the problem may be less of an issue now.

It does, however, seem as though Rave users are now complaining about "unfair bans." These posts have grown over the last six months.

Notably, Rave does allow users to stream pornography, even after the security update. This is hardly a secret use, with some users on Reddit asking for ways to get around "buggy" age verification to do so.

Considering Apple's history with attempting to keep apps that facilitate viewing pornography off its platform, it stands to reason that it will not return Rave to the App Store anytime soon. And, that doesn't even address Apple's mandate that user-generated content be moderated.

And, given legal precedent, it's not likely to be forced to.